The use of non-volatile digital storage has been a rapidly growing with the advancement of the computer market. The requirement for mobile non-volatile storage has been growing with the use of computer laptops. Furthermore with the requirement for larger capacities for music players such as the iPod player by apple (www.apple.com/ipod) the requirement for digital storage is ever growing. Devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones are using non-volatile memory cards such as the flash-cards by Sandisk (www.sandisk.com) to store images and other data. Other devices of the Key-Chain Storage family by M-systems (www.m-sys.com) include USB connectivity for computers to act as a floppy disk replacement.
Another storage entity that is widely used is a storage server that is located over a network. A server on the network may be used as a virtual drive so that the same virtual drive is available from any computer or appliance that connects to the virtual drive. Such a drive may be a network drive such as a drive located over the network or other types of drives such as the XDrive (http://www.xdrive.com/).
A unit of digital storage such as a computer hard disk, a flash card or a Key-Chain storage device and other such digital storage devices will be referred herein as a digital media storage device, or a media device.
A media device, unlike a floppy diskette includes a controller with some RAM, and or ROM or other memory. This has become necessary as these devices became more complex, managing their media transparently to the appliance, for example, in order to hide media defects and manage the media on a higher level.
Mobile storage medias can connect to a variety of digital appliances. One example is the U3 environment (www.u3.com) and ceedo (www.ceedo.com) in which USB flash drives can be used on different computers to carry user workspace and files wherever the user goes. This ability is efficient for people who move around, who have more than one computer or need to work from home. People who needed laptops can now use a U3 USB device and work from anywhere a computer is found.
Storage drives such as media devices and network drives as described above are useful indeed but pose a security threat for data integrity. A storage device may connect to a number of digital appliances and is therefore at risk of getting infected with viruses and other malware. Storage device may then transfer these infections to other digital appliances that connect to it. The storage device is further at risk of leaking crucial information or loosing critical information due to a hostile appliance the storage device may connect to.
There are various solutions for overcoming these security issues. One approach for dealing with security issues is to create an encrypted file system on the storage device such as in Dekart Disk Firewall. (http://www.dekart.com/products/encrytion/private_disk/) The problem with this solution is that protection does not occur by default. Special software needs to be installed and managed. In addition, there are actually two drives on the device, a protected and unprotected drive. This two-drive property is an undesirable property, requiring user to be aware of the secure environment, leaving it for the user to maintain security.
Another approach is to create several partitions in a storage device, each partition having a separate policy and protection. Such example is explained in patent application to Yu, Roger application 20030131112 titled Computer firewall system. This approach requires partitioning of the storage device and requires the user to be aware of that partitioning and be in charge of security.
The attempt of the present invention is to present a storage firewall system that works by default, on the standard single partition of a storage device, in a transparent manner, without user intervention and without requiring the user to be aware or manage security issues. In addition, this invention presents ways to protect data on a digital appliance that media device connects to.
There is thus a widely recognized need for a storage firewall in a media device that can protect files transparently on a single partition, and it would be highly advantageous to have such a device devoid of the above limitations.